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Month: March 2007

SF Bay area, actually. Locked in a hotel room, finishing the April installment of HARRY. Though, the day job is paying me to soak up all the goodness that Oracle is willing to give about Application Server 10gR2 during business hours. But, here it is coming on midnight, and I’ve got several hours of editing yet to go. Hardly the glamorous life. Anyway, realized while I was *ahem* procrastinating and reading LJ *ahem* that it’s been a long time since I popped up here.

So, to the quick: kids are growing (Solomon is 3, Zipporah is what? nine months old? nearly ten? crawling like she has a plan anyway), my eternally patient wife has been persistently gracious (if this writing thing never takes off, I should devote the rest of my life petitioning for her sainthood), and way too many hours of the day have been filled with work and writing.

Yeah, I’ve been tapped to be the Architect/Administrator of a SOA Suite installation at the office (a minor IT project that is only, oh, the cornerstone of the five year strategy–it’s nice to have a project, I guess), which has certainly been as all-consuming as an Oracle implementation can be. When I’m not there, I’ve been bending my brain around the HARRY project. Somehow my three month lead turned into a three week lead, which isn’t nearly enough. Especially if I’m, you know, properly foreshadowing and all. I have fortunately mapped most of it out to the end so I do know where all the pieces are going, but it would certainly be nice to have little time to work up proper background material for Dr. Ehirllimbal’s journal and Safiq’s Book of Dreams. (Yeah, I know, whining.)

Did you know that the Bay area is home to Amoeba Music, Rasputin Music, and Aquarius Records? Did you know that a properly motivated boy in a rental car can hit three out of four (Amoeba has two stores within a half hour drive of each other) in an evening? Amoeba and Rasputin are manageable, but man, Aquarius is EVIL. It’s been years since I’ve actually been faced with so much music that I had never seen before that I actually had to read the spine on every CD (sadly enough, over the last few years my pattern recognition skills have been demoted to memorizing CD covers). On one hand, Aquarius is a perfect match for my recent tastes, but at the same time, there are huge stretches of some genres that are just…man, I was a noob. A giddy schoolboy of a noob. With a credit card.

Speaking of Takashi Miike, I watched Imprint while I was off getting my head filled with BPEL a few weeks ago. Man, yeah, now that it’s all faded enough, I can talk about it. Miike’s done some pretty out there stuff and his fascination with needles makes me really really want to leave the room, but Imprint was just…so…wrong. Amazingly so, but just skin-crawlingly one bad thing after the other. I mean, kudos to him for saying: “Masters of Horror? I show you some horror, pal.” It wasn’t just the torture scene or the head scene or the history of the family’s occupational hazards or the intra-family dynamic or the bucket in the prison. It was Billy Drago’s character’s reaction to it all in the end. That was the worst, because MIIKE SOLD ME ON IT, totally putting me in empathetic agreement with the character’s emotional state.

Part Three of The Oneiromantic Mosaic of Harry Potemkin is up at Farrago’s Wainscot. I like the Farrago Approved Summary: “Number three brings you functioning cryptography, numbers stations, and a sacrificial cock—all under the guise of noir, psychopharmacological investigation.”

This is the third dream. Or you can go visit the second and first again, where you will discover that the context beneath it isn’t the same. As we go, we’ll be linking the new content back into the flow of the old so that you can, really, enter the story at any of the dream points.